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tempi.
The similarity, though, ends there.
If anything, Opus 26 looks forward, not
backward.
In Schumann's unusually critical review of
Chopin's second
sonata, he complained that Chopin had not
really
written a sonata at all, but rather had,
"united four of his most unruly
children."
In many ways, the same comment--I would
not
personally deem it a criticism--applies
to Beethoven's Opus 26.
In the case of both the Beethoven and the
Chopin, it's not cohesion, but the
imagination on display and the inarguably
high quality
of the material that makes the works
distinguished.
Or rather, the cohesion of the work cannot
be explained by examining the structure,
or fishing around
for motivic connections between the
movements. There simply
is an emotional logic to the succession of
events-another link between this sonata and
the Romantic era, which sometimes valued
feeling over form.
And the comparison of Opus 26 to the Chopin
sonata
is really a pertinent one for other
reasons as well.
While Chopin was pretty much alone among
the top-shelf composers of the 19thcentury in that he didn't like Beethoven
and didn't admit to being influenced by
him,
he did like this particular sonata.
And as we will see shortly, part of the
work
clearly took up residence in Chopin's
head.
So, having abandoned the sonata form for
the first movement,
Beethoven instead gives us a series of
variations in a leisurely tempo.
This does have certain precedence.
Haydn occasionally began his two-movement
sonatas with slow variations.
But honestly, his two-movement works
really constitute a genre unto themselves.
They don't belong to a discussion of
Beethoven and the piano sonata.
Mozart began his "Alla Turca Sonata: with a
set of variations, but that sonata
is a set of unruly children if ever there
was one in the Classical period.